Merritt Graves
Sunlight 24
First published by Merritt Graves 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Merritt Graves
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
First edition
ISBN: 9781949272048
Illustration by Tamas Medve
Cover art by Nick Castle
This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
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Contents
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Preface
Warning: This novel contains graphic language and violence.
A special thanks to Peter and KayMaria Daskarolis, as well Leann Graves and Fran Lebowitz.
Chapter 1
Stealing is aggressive and mean-spirited. It’s antisocial. Desperate. And because I’d never thought of myself as those things, I still couldn’t believe that we’d broken into someone else’s house. It was more like someone else’s house in someone else’s dream, in some other remote, foreign plane of existence. The action was so bellicose and ethereal, alien to everything I’d done before, that the whole bedroom appeared reimagined: The dresser’s edges sharper. The blinds’ shadows deeper. The walls and everything alongside them looking closer or farther away than they actually were.
The disbelief endured as I drifted into the closet, but the physics smeared around it. My mind controlling robot limbs that weren’t quite synced up. Every step somehow permanent. Irretraceable.
I’d never wanted to take the first one. Never had I thought, oh, this is such a great idea—I really want to rob people. It was more just this hint of inevitability. This sense that you were falling. Because even when you promised yourself that you weren’t going to do it, you knew you were going to. Like breathing in a way, since the alternative was a hot car with your face pressed up against the window—dying a little more every second while you watched the world go by. An abandoned animal, blinking back tears.
My penlight carved a bluish cylinder through the closet’s interior, crisscrossing the safe in a series of progressively slower strokes before settling on a circle of metal. For a second I thought it might be a Hitsinomi with its slender, geometric build and graphene coating, but the touchpad was a little too small. And the override cover a little too square-ish.
Another few strokes revealed tiny print in the bottom left corner: Severino. Who the fuck were they?
“You’re awfully quiet,” Ethan said behind me.
I pretended not to hear, gliding the penlight up from the print to the release, back to the print again.
“You can’t open it, can you?” he asked.
“Not with you in my way, shithead,” I said, wanting to lay into him about how he’d rushed us into this. But now I just needed to calm down. Analyze. Even though I hadn’t seen this kind of electronic safe before, they all required power, and the attack would probably still work if I was able to find the batteries.
Most of the time they were near the keypad. Or at least they had been during the hundred or so safe-breaking demo videos I’d watched at the public library this summer. I’d bike down each day after football camp and snag the last workstation on the row—the only one that fell outside the security cameras’ scope, which I’d confirmed one day after Ethan had told the desk staffer that a couple was having sex in the stacks. I knew then that if anyone ever traced my queries back to the library, the most they’d see of me on the footage would be a stray elbow, or maybe a foot.
From there we’d made schematics, cased houses, arranged alibis—did all the stuff we thought thieves would do. We’d just been dissuading reality at first. Joking around. But the thing is, if you make a joke enough times, slowly, deceptively, that joke makes the foreign sound familiar. It adds flesh to fiction. I thought we were tightening dreamed-up bolts and hammering imaginary nails when in fact we were building a ship that would make serious the question of our departure. It wasn’t until Ethan plopped the glass cutter down in front of me, though, that I first got that icy, downward swirl in the pit of my stomach. I’d traced the cutter’s edge with the tip of my index finger and winced when it broke the skin. The feeling made it real.
After running my hands over the safe a half-dozen times, that same electric feeling surfaced as my thumb brushed past a little groove in the back, bottom corner. Once I clicked it and slid the cover under the paneling, there were the batteries, tucked away in a little nondescript compartment five centimeters deep.
I connected the resistor a few moments later and waves appeared on the oscilloscope’s readout—the firmware on the attached PCB already cycling through combinations—just like in the videos. The idea was that the microcontroller unit in the safe needed to talk to the EEPROM every time a key was pressed, and it would take a slightly different amount of time, and there’d be a slightly different amount of power used, depending on whether it was a right key or a wrong key. The safe’s designers tried to patch the vulnerability by locking the safe out after the fifth try, but the algorithm got around this by simply cutting power first and starting over. Only the side-channel attack didn’t start over since all the wave forms were saved on the oscilloscope and analyzed until a pattern could be deduced.
“It’s working,” I said in wonder, as if we’d breathed life into an alien monolith. It all made sense again.
The light from the cycling cut across the walk-in closet where we crouched, and I noticed Mrs. Moore’s dresses hanging on the back wall. Some ordinary, drawing from an urbane, professional-grade palette, but there were a lot of short, high-fashion evening gowns as well—at odds with the austere type she’d seemed casing the house. They hinted at a kind of insecurity. Maybe being what you buy when you think the robots your husband builds captivate him more than you do.
Empathizing with her, I walked backward out of the closet until I was standing next to a Sumatran bed, the runner draping over the
duvet reminding me of the suite my friend Alexie’s parents had gotten when they’d taken us to Universal Studios in seventh grade. The pillows impossibly soft. The sheets a bleached, chemical-looking white, perfectly folded under the sides.
My glove lingered on the high-thread-count fabric. I wasn’t materialistic, but everything my family possessed was beat up, and every time I’d dressed up for a party or a date or whatever, there was this striving, desperate quality to it that I hated. This blue-collar night-on-town vibe that announced that not only were you coming up short, but you were a sucker enough to swallow a watered-down version of what you couldn’t have. That even though they were fucking you over, you were still playing their game, eulogizing their myth—coloring it in with your own bland complicity. It pained me to think that something that superficial could bother me—and it really didn’t that much—but the deficient feeling endured, reappearing just enough to remind me that it was there.
On a dresser next to the bed, I glimpsed a family portrait of what looked like genuinely nice people. They didn’t just have the expected put-on smiles, but seemed to be in the moment, laughing about a joke one of them had just told—Mrs. Moore the most of anyone. I thought of the way my mom would fuss over family pictures, even when we explained that that she could use her film to remember everything automatically. For her it wasn’t just about reconstituting blurry images or stitching timelines back into succession; she wanted to “remember together,” as she always put it, coaxing us into a bunch of new clothes she’d return the next day.
I took a deep breath, suddenly feeling nauseous. Everyone looks nice in family pictures, I tried to tell myself.
On my way down the hall I passed Ethan, who was rifling through drawers in the son’s room—piles of t-shirts and button downs stacked up in a semi-circle around him. The space dark except for the faintest trace of light leaking through the blinds. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Kids are always stashing money. And the best part is no one bats an eye when they lose it.”
The nausea worsened.
“Don’t give me that look. What’s the point of breaking into a house if you’re not going to take anything? Huh?”
“They’ll know. They’ll know we’ve been here if you mess it up too much.”
Ethan looked up at me, curling his lip through the mask. “No shit.”
Shaking my head, I went down the steps toward Dr. Moore’s home office we’d seen on the way in. Since he was a rather well-known robotics professor, we wanted to swipe some of his schematics and prototypes while the device worked on the safe. Understanding I wouldn’t have time to snap them all or be able to tell the good ones from the bad, the main idea was to just sell access to ones he’d already digitally rendered. This meant finding his passwords.
I reached for the office light and caught myself; there was only one window on the far wall, but it was getting dark and the neighbors might see it and wonder. Instead, I took the penlight from my pocket and shined it around on a 3D printer, a wall of tools, and rows and rows of bookshelves overflowing with ancient reference volumes and industry periodicals that gave off the same musty scent as the basement stacks in the public library.
This confirmed Professor Moore’s reputation. Link reviews complained that he was a sentimentalist who insisted that students turn in a hard copy of all their assignments, so we’d hoped that maybe he kept hard copies of all his stuff, too. If the lack of a working alarm system was any indication, they might be somewhere fairly obvious.
I leafed through the electronic papers on his oak desk, careful not to disturb their placement, although in contrast to the pristine, near clinical immaculateness of the rest of the house, the department communiques, budget requests, and last semester’s student evaluations were in such disarray that it scarcely mattered how I handled them. Top drawer: precision pens, controllers, file clips. Second drawer: digital gloves, electronic paper, jump drives. I scratched my forehead through the ski mask and looked up at my film; three minutes until the device would finish sequencing. Third drawer: clear retina covers, batteries, red notebook. I took out the red notebook. Drawings. Schematics. My pupils expanded. Passwords. Passwords to everything. I couldn’t believe it was this easy. I grabbed my old camera and turned it on.
“You found it.”
I drew in a sharp breath and froze, then let it go slowly when I realized the voice was Ethan’s.
“Jeez. Take it easy, man.”
“I’m trying,” I whispered, my voice at about half his volume.
“The thing . . . the thing’s done early. It changed colors.”
The 35mm’s blue ready-light flickered and I pressed down, eliciting a bright flash and then a gentle hum as it captured the page. I could’ve just taken a picture with my retinal film, but for security reasons had decided it best to keep things analog for now. “That’s great.”
Ethan looked over my shoulder at the red notebook. “Quite the score there. We’ll probably get more from the skims and passwords than we are from—”
The sound of the front door opening stopped Ethan short.
“Christ.” I shut the notebook and put it back in the drawer, closing it as quietly as
possible. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.” I looked over at the small oval window. Too small to fit through.
Ethan stumbled to the open door. “Come on.”
“No,” I hissed. “They’re right out there.”
People were talking in the hallway. My eyes darted around the office as a boy’s voice carried faintly inside. “Did he say when I can take them out?”
Then a woman’s. “They should dissolve in about a week.”
“Where do they dissolve to?”
“Into your body. Processed collagen is absorbable, so we don’t have to go back to the doctor’s. That’s good, right?”
They were right outside the door. The disorienting surreal of the moments prior collapsed into a more vivid, higher-def reality that felt nanometers away. Sharp. Staccato. The seconds landing on top of each other.
“Yeah, that’s good.” He paused. “Hey look, Dad’s office’s open.”
“Oh . . . did you go in there this morning?”
“No . . .” The boy’s footsteps entered the room. “Light on,” he commanded and soft white spilled through the crack under the closet door we’d closed a second earlier.
The woman’s shadow appeared in the doorway beside him.
“Maybe Dad left it open,” said the boy.
“Yeah.” I could feel her presence, only six feet away, and imagined her eyes scanning the desk, the bookshelves, the shut closet. “Though, that’s not very like him.”
“And it doesn’t look like Fredbo got in—no track marks,” the boy observed, his words making my heart slam faster, aggressive and uneven. Never wanting to run more in my life, but knowing that I couldn’t even move a millimeter.
“Hmmm. You’d think he would’ve scooted in here to clean if the door was open.”
“Uh-huh,” the boy agreed. “He does in my room.”
Mrs. Moore’s shoes made a clacking noise as she paced across the hardwood floor, circling the desk before stopping right next to the closet door. I could hear her breathing as I raised a hand to my mouth to cover my own. “I guess we’ll ask him when he gets home.”
More breathing. “It’s just kind of strange.” Tap tap tap. She was rapping her fingers on the bookshelf—each one ringing out into the silence. Making it clear just how the thin the sonic barrier was between us. And how many things there were around me that would make noises if I bumped into them.
“What’s for dinner?” the boy asked after a few moments.
The question hung in the air as she kept tapping, before finally drawing her hand back and replying, “I don’t know, let’s go see what’s in the fridge.” Clack. Clack. Clack. She was walking away. “Lights off,” the kid ordered, following her a few moments later.
He shut the door and Ethan expelled a breath be
side me. “Jesus,” he whispered. “How the hell did they get home so fast?”
“Don’t know. There’s probably a medpad at the school—it’s Lawrence Prep after all.”
“Of all . . . the fucking days.”
I heard drawers opening and the sound of clanking silverware from the kitchen, just across the hall from the office. Waiting until someone had turned on the sink, I slid the closet door to the side, careful not to let the rollers rub against the wood. Don’t panic. They don’t know you’re here. And they never will either if you can get the device out before she goes up to her bedroom to change.
I crept gingerly toward the narrow strip of light beaming from under the office door, then pressed my ear up against it, straining to hear the muffled voices.
“Yeah, he sideswiped me, and I fell on Terry’s cleat.”
“Did he mean to?”
“No, no, he’s just careless. Careless about everything, really. He was right there the whole time—you could tell he really felt bad, but he’s so talented that no one calls him on anything. And so he doesn’t ever change.”
“Will you tell him that?”
There were more clanking and footsteps.
“The pattern would just get lost in the accident since it’s so fresh. Probably best to wait ‘till—”
I pulled my ear back and looked over at Ethan. “The angle’s bad,” I whispered to him. “Their voices are loud enough I bet you can see the door from there.”
“Well, we gotta do something,” he whispered back.
“I know. I know we do,” I said, and put my ear back up, this time lower to the ground.
“It looks like we have everything we need for a stir fry,” Mrs. Moore was saying. “Is that okay?”
“Uh huh. Are there any water chestnuts left, though?”
She paused. “I think so. You can check—they should be in the bottom drawer.”
A few seconds later I heard the refrigerator door being opened and the sound of rummaging. “Yeah, they’re in there. Is this cabbage too old or can we use it?”
“We can use it.”
Dammit, even if they were standing at the far side of the kitchen with their backs turned—I wouldn’t know—and had to assume they’d notice the movement. I got down on my knees and tried to peek through the door slit, but could only see a few feet ahead of me, barely into the kitchen.
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